Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Drought-Stricken Literature
“And a new literature of drought may be emerging—one with room for stories that recall the past, but also for the possibility of trouble on a scale we’ve never seen before” According to Anna North, water—or rather the lack there…
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Infinite Brickjest
Fascinated by The Brick Bible, Professor Kevin Griffith of Ohio’s Capital University has had his 11-years-old son Sebastian recreating in LEGO bricks 100 scenes from David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest. Griffith explained to The Guardian: “I would describe a scene to him…
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Phantom Shelves
Do you ever love a book so much you can’t wait to present it to everyone you know? Sadie Stein does, and keeps all those titles in a special “Phantom Shelf.” She wrote about the shelf over at The Paris Review.
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Road Tripping for Inspiration
“We’re doing this because we’re buds and we’re starting new books. We’ve always talked our ideas through with each other; it’s always helped. Through these conversations, we’ve grown as writers together.” Josh Weil and Mike Harvkey have been longtime friends.…
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Bookless Libraries
Florida Polytechnic University has just opened, in a building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, a completely bookless library. Available to all the students is a catalog of 135,000 e-books that can be consulted in an impressive, completely empty room…
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Rising to Literature’s Bait
From Ernest Hemingway to Richard Brautigan and Jim Harrison, fishing and literature has always had a strong, mysterious link. Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone goes deep into this ancient relationship.
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Borges and Sartre at the Movies
Turns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well. Head over to the Paris…
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Writing Like Someone You Haven’t Yet Read
Of course you don’t have to read an author’s work to have to deal with their influence. Major figures like Faulkner, Pynchon, Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace cast such a wide shadow that they’re a liability for every writer today.…
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A Family Affair
I always think of you as a more novelistic novelist than I am. I’m not predisposed to like poetry. I’m not the kind of person who thinks of poetry as charming or who says of something, “it’s like poetry,” as…
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Dealing with the Trolls
I do know that job one is to keep writing and talking about the things that scare the trolls – not just feminism but race and LGBT rights and everything else that pisses them off. Filters and moderators and sign-in…
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Looking at America from Far Away
Since I arrived, two years ago, I’ve grown more interested in works about American expats, especially those in which the characters are not quite comfortable in their settings. I wanted to see what this literature said about the ways in…
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Everything in Its Right Place
The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively…